People Leaving Is Normal

Firstly, let’s dispel a myth: it’s completely normal for people to leave your team, your department, and your company. In 2018, based on LinkedIn data, it was reported [Boo18] that the tech sector in the United States has a yearly turnover rate of 13.2%, the highest of any other business sector. Yes, that’s even higher than the retail sector, which was second highest at 13%. Think about that for a second: if your department has 1,000 staff, by the end of the year, on average, you’ll be down to 868 staff through attrition alone. That’s a lot of hiring to do to keep the department the same size. As you saw in Chapter 7, ​Join Us!​, hiring people is hard work, so if people leave, you want to make sure that it’s for the right reasons.

Now, my parents would certainly be shocked by that statistic. My father’s last job before he retired had him doing eighteen years of service. In this new world where everyone’s tenure is becoming ever shorter, how can we hope to make the best of the situation? How can we adjust our own expectations and feelings about people leaving to make the situation as painless as possible?

People are always going to leave. It’s normal and it sucks. Just read it a few times and let it sink in. As a manager, you’re doomed to failure if you think that you’re going to keep everyone in your current team indefinitely. You will only set your expectations such that you’ll feel terrible when someone does hand in their notice. Be comfortable with the fact that all of our careers are different and we’re all motivated by varying aspects: challenge, location, comfort, working hours, programming languages and frameworks, friends, and new opportunities to name but a few. They can all be conflicting forces in career decisions.

However, believe it or not, turnover can be good for you [Ash19]. Companies change all the time, especially if they’re small and growing quickly. The people that were hired at one point in the company’s history may not be best suited for the company at its next stage of evolution. A natural turnover ensures that you have more opportunities to hire people who are best suited to the particular challenges that you’re facing at that time.

You can split employee departures into two camps:

• Voluntary. They’re leaving of their own accord.
• Involuntary. You’re making them leave, typically for performance reasons.

Sometimes these categories are referred to as regrettable and non-regrettable. There are clearly two things to focus on here: making sure that those that are leaving voluntarily are doing so for positive reasons and that there’s effectively nothing you could—or should—want to do to make them stay. We’ll look into voluntary departures in the first half of this chapter.

The second reason—involuntary departure—is where you’re having to terminate employment for some reason, typically because of poor performance. It’s your responsibility as a manager to ensure that employees that are unable to be transformed into good performers don’t stay in your organization. After all, your bar is only as high as your worst performing employee. Hiring well gets you most of the way to ensuring that this won’t happen, but people and situations change. We’ll give you the tools you need to ensure that you can manage poor performance and turn it into good performance, or in the worst case, arrange for that member of staff to depart.

We’ll begin by looking at voluntary departures.